This authentic Blackfoot legend captures the culture and landscape of the Great Plains in the time before the arrival of settlers.

This authentic Blackfoot legend captures the culture and landscape of the Great Plains in the time before the arrival of settlers.

The sixth tale in our Legend series, The Legend of the Petoskey Stone focuses on the naming of this unique fossil, found only on the shores of Lake Michigan. From the ancient, warm sea that covered most of the state, through Native American history and the history of the town named after a great chief, The Legend of the Petoskey Stone is a welcome addition to the fables so richly told and illustrated by this much-loved and honored children's book team.Author Kathy-jo Wargin has earned national acclaim through award-winning children's classics such as Michigan's official state book, The Legend of Sleeping Bear, Children's Choice Award winner The Legend of the Loon, The Edmund Fitzgerald: Song of the Bell, and many others. Kathy-jo enjoys writing about nature and its effect on all our lives, and is a frequent guest speaker throughout the country. She is also a faculty member of the Bear River Writers Workshop, sponsored by the University of Michigan. She lives in Petoskey, Michigan. Since the publication of The Legend of Sleeping Bear, artist Gijsbert van Frankenhuyzen has been an established presence in the world of children's book illustration. His many other titles with Sleeping Bear Press include The Edmund Fitzgerald: Song of the Bell, Adopted by an Owl, Jam & Jelly by Holly & Nellie, and The Legend of Leelanau. Gijsbert and his family live in Bath, Michigan.

A Lakota Indian legend in which the White Buffalo Woman presents her people with the Sacred Calf Pipe which gives them the means to pray to the Great Spirit.

The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils? Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries. Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.